When help is wanted, poachers work overtime

Washington, D.C. — The wind is blowing in the right direction for employees looking for an upgrade.

With a tight labor market, a healthy economy, and available positions outnumbering the number of bodies in the workforce, job poaching is on the rise.

Chad Moutray, chief economist of the National Association of Manufacturers delivered the news to a room full of pro dealers and LBM manufacturers attending the NLBMDA 2018 Spring Meeting & Legislative Conference.

While the manufacturing sector hired 360,000 in January 2018 there were also more than 350,000 separations. According to Moutray, many of those separations weren’t layoffs or terminations – it was employees quitting their jobs and finding other positions in greener pastures.

With the economy on solid footing, and labor in demand, recruiters are actively hunting employed professionals on LinkedIn, among other sites, Moutray said.

“The word poaching comes up a lot. The labor market is so tight,” Moutray noted. “Poaching is one of the biggest challenges right now.”

On a positive note, companies are hiring: there are roughly 424,000 manufacturing openings or job postings, according to Moutray. “The good news is even in a world where they say the robots are taking jobs away, we’re hiring.”

Unemployment has remained at 4.1% for five months in a row — the lowest since December 2000 — while overall manufacturing workers total 12.6 million, which is the most since the Great Recession. Although manufacturing has added about 1.1 million jobs since the beginning of 2010, 2.3 million positions were lost during the recession.

Moutray says a possible solution to the labor gap is growth among apprenticeship programs.

“It needs to be not just in manufacturing but jobs across the board,” Moutray explained. “It can be in accounting. We have to recognize that everyone is not college bound and we need to teach the trades. We just don’t do that anymore. The reality is you can make a great living.”